Operators of communication networks face a challenge in how to secure mobile broadband revenues.
The tremendous uptake in mobile broadband subscribers and data volume will require substantial investments in operators' telecom infrastructure. On the other hand, users will expect their operator to deliver the service experience they have paid for. Thus, operator revenues from mobile broadband rely on satisfied customers.
A small fraction of the users generates traffic exceeding those of normal users with magnitude. In many networks, these heavy users are consuming a quite large part of today's network resources. Experience shows that heavy users normally constitutes of 5-10% of the total subscribers, but could consume 70-85% of the network resources. It has been shown that often the heavy users are the biggest consumers of the network resources also during busy hour.
With policy control operators can distribute the traffic load more evenly, giving a defined Quality of Service QoS, e.g. more bandwidth resources, for the normal users (the majority of the subscribers), particularly during the busy hour. Policy control also enables operators to push the heavy user's traffic into the non-busy hours where number of normal users is lower. For some heavy user applications, time of day is not very critical since they click to download and leave the application running for hours or even days before completing a larger download. Policy control therefore helps controlling network capacity utilization by managing the traffic in a smarter way.
Today and in the future, operators are introducing new premium services, for example ring tones download, TV, video streaming, VoIP, etc. To make sure that the subscribers get the best end user experience while consuming these premium services policy control is used to allocate more bandwidth for these applications when being accessed.
Operators use policy control to move away from a blanket, flat fee for everyone, to the right price for the right service at the right time ensuring users get the user experience paid for. This gives consumers the chance to choose a subscription that best meets their circumstances and decide how to act when the subscription doesn't meet their current, specific needs.
For operators, policy control makes it possible to get the most value from their bandwidth, by leveraging the right price for the right service at the right time.
In order to handle policy control and charging, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project 3GPP has in TS 23.203 V10.4.0 (2011-06) specified a policy and charging control PCC functionality encompassing the two main functions:                Policy control (e.g. gating control, QoS control, QoS signaling, etc.);        Flow Based Charging, including charging control and online credit control.        
The PCC functionality is comprised by the functions of the Policy and Charging Enforcement Function PCEF, the Bearer Binding and Event Reporting Function BBERF, the Policy and Charging Rules Function PCRF, the Application Function AF, the Online Charging System OCS, the Offline Charging System OFCS and the Subscription Profile Repository SPR or the User Data Repository UDR.
The PCC architecture extends the architecture of an IP Connectivity Access Network IP-CAN, e.g. GPRS, where the PCEF is a functional entity in the gateway node implementing the IP access to the Packet Data Network PDN.
The PCRF is the part of the network architecture that aggregates information to and from the network supporting the creation of rules and then making policy decisions for subscribers active on the network.
In the mobile networks it is becoming more and more common that also machines as for example electricity meters and car supervision devices are communicating with no or little human interaction. Communication devices in such machines will be more numerous than the devices used for human communication, and even though most of them may not generate a lot of traffic on a per device basis the sheer number of devices in a communication network will generate a lot of traffic. Certain machines, for example surveillance cameras, may also send significant amount of data. Estimates indicate that within a few years the worldwide number of communicating entities may reach 50 billion devices.
Although the use and advantage for society of such massive communication capability as utilized by M2M traffic is ample the value of each single transmission may be considered low. It is therefore essential that available capacity of the communication network is utilized in an efficient manner. A drawback with policy control as specified by 3GPP TS 23.203 is that the policy enforcement provided by the PCEF only serves to limit traffic throughput exceeding that imposed by the policy control rules of the PCRF.